


Idyll

by Nerve_Itch



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: (just to clarify), (not penises), Again, Cuba, Dehydration, Domestic Bliss, HannibaLibre, Hurt/Comfort, I promise, M/M, Murder Husbands, Whump, dramatic weather, graphic depictions of injuries and wounds, lovingly aggressive oral, s4, stupidly loving co-dependent cannibals, things going into wounds that shouldn't be in them, this time with actual comfort, will suffering terribly - again, wound care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-29
Updated: 2016-11-29
Packaged: 2018-09-03 01:08:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8690635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nerve_Itch/pseuds/Nerve_Itch
Summary: Sunshine, Will found, was quite the antidote to anxiety. The aches and rattles of misery that had been resident inside his bones for more years than he’d counted, they weren’t so prominent, now. His scars – and there were plenty of them – felt like proof of his healing, thick under his fingertips, and warm beneath Hannibal’s. They’d somehow achieved the impossible these last months; they were together, in ways Will had never chanced to hope for with anyone, and they were both alive. If Will were being reductive, he’d simply say that he was happy…...Not accounting for a violent interruption to the Caribbean paradise.





	

Sunshine, Will found, was quite the antidote to anxiety. The aches and rattles of misery that had been resident inside his bones for more years than he’d counted, they weren’t so prominent, now. His scars – and there were plenty of them – felt like proof of his healing, thick under his fingertips, and warm beneath Hannibal’s. They no longer screamed from his skin like threats, or reminders. Even the house they now occupied let light in, through broad patio doors, wide windows, and, Will dared to think, in the looks shared between himself and Hannibal. They’d somehow achieved the impossible these last months; they were together, in ways Will had never chanced to hope for with anyone, and they were both alive. If Will were being reductive, he’d simply say that he was happy.

 

“The storm took out the water again,” Will called from the kitchen, swivelling the tap in case it yielded anything more than a rust coloured drizzle. It didn’t.

“Then we will drink wine.” Hannibal appeared behind Will, placing warm hands on his bare shoulders. “I daresay it will make fixing the fence more pleasurable.”

Will started to protest that it was barely nine in the morning, and that he sought water to soothe his head from the previous night’s rum, but Hannibal’s mouth was at the back of his neck, telling him to stop worrying at the tap, that he’d replenish their bottled water supply after lunchtime, and that he had an idea of how to keep each other entertained before then. Then, his mouth was at the tip of Will’s ears; the touch of teeth raising the slightest of stings. Will reached behind him, pulled Hannibal flush to his back, creeping his fingers beneath the cotton of his shirt to scrape his nails over the warm skin of Hannibal’s hips. Hannibal’s answer was to bite at Will’s shoulder; a controlled thing, just enough to pull a stutter out of Will’s breathing. The careful imitations of violence, the reminders of who they still were, without the pain of aftermath.

“Now?” Will asked, part hesitancy and part hope.

Hannibal nudged him forward, pressing him flush against the sink. “Not now. You have a fence to fix.”

Will pushed back, pivoting on his heels to face Hannibal, the urge to kiss him in fondness sitting equal and opposed to the desire to shove him to the ground, in hunger or frustration or both. Hannibal caught the confusion as he was wont to do, pre-empting either action by guiding Will swiftly to his knees. Will knew this game; the tally between them, of acts given and received, and was almost certain that it had not yet turned to Hannibal’s favour. And yet, he pulled at the clasps of Hannibal’s pale grey trousers – a clothing decision he vowed to make Hannibal regret – and accepted the offered challenge. If he was honest with himself, he enjoyed having Hannibal somewhat in his debt.

Hannibal was far from full, and this made things seem easier, to Will; still not fully confident in his own ability to master what Hannibal excelled at. He ventured a tongue to the tip of Hannibal’s cock, rolling the taste in his mouth. He may not have Hannibal’s deftness of movement, but he had other ways in which to speed Hannibal’s unravelling. Anchoring himself with his right hand wrapped around Hannibal’s hip, he wetted the fingers of his left in slow, drawling licks, his eyes fixed up at Hannibal’s.

“Will.”

Will opened his mouth, wrapped it around the emerging, swelling tip and danced damp fingers across the base of him, keeping himself from smiling as Hannibal leant forward to hold onto the sink. He toyed at Hannibal for long minutes this way, keeping breath in his lungs, emboldened by the shake in Hannibal’s breaths and the hand twisting through his hair. It felt delicate, almost, until it didn’t.

The hand in his hair twisted harder, stinging his scalp, and Will knew to expect this; knew that he could only be permitted teasing for so long until Hannibal’s greed overwhelmed them both. He pulled back for a breath, eyes and nose beginning to stream, and braced himself for the shunt back in, mouth suckered and full and the pressure building. He knew, reminded himself that he knew, that he could push Hannibal away, and instead felt himself pulling Hannibal onto him, into him, speeding the motion and gulping at what little air he could catch.

“Breathe through your nose.”

Will couldn’t answer back that he was _trying_ , that he just needed to feel _full_ , that he could, in his way, undo Hannibal and feel his own insides contracting with heat and hunger. He clawed, instead; nails denting the soft skin of Hannibal’s back below his scars. The unspoken signal that one minor cruelty should beget another. And so, Hannibal responded in kind; both hands now interlocked within the dampening tendrils of Will’s hair and propelling a fitful, jerking pace. Will felt himself reaching the point of too much, his throat clenching and saliva welling at the sides of his mouth, and resolved to take himself past it. His nails dug indents into Hannibal’s skin as his head knocked the sink edge, and he refused to let go. The weight of Hannibal seemed to bear down upon his head and as Will relaxed his throat, blinked moisture from his eyes and stared at Hannibal’s closed face, he felt like an anchor; resilient, holding Hannibal to him. As though hearing Will’s thoughts, Hannibal gasped; a sound more terrifying in its vulnerability than any other Will ever heard him make; and released. Will folded, then; worked his throat to swallow what he could and used his fingers to catch what he couldn’t. His next breaths were lost in coughing and in gasping, and then they were muffled by the fabric still hanging from Hannibal’s thighs as he felt himself pulled against them, hands in his hair now stroking, not tugging. Will held on, wrapped around Hannibal’s legs. Too drained to take the opportunity to pull Hannibal down, or to spoil the disappointingly unmarked trousers, but still, in some sense, content.

 

Fixing the disarray left by the storm proved a heavier task than first calculated. Despite Hannibal’s assertions, the crisp white wine was not as refreshing as Will would have liked. Sweat crept from every pore and created a sheen which made handling the tools vaguely unsafe. He’d sent Hannibal to the store to get water, juice, fruit, _anything_ , having accepted that he was no assistance when it came to manual labour. He was genuinely concerned that he’d dehydrate and dissolve in the heat otherwise. Resurrecting the fence was paramount; the tangle of felled wood and barbed wire that now made up their front yard was a threat to any wildlife that may wander up the beach, and the small dunes of sand blown onto the patio were already sifting grit into his soft shoes. So, he grappled with wooden posts, stapling wire back into position and cutting off what was beyond rescue. He worked until sweat stung at his eyes and his limbs shook from exhaustion, and some minutes beyond. It felt peaceful, in the ways that Will understood peace; a methodical, physical clearing of space, an end goal, and the potential to feel satisfaction when the task could be deemed complete. The storm had simply been a storm; no intent, no portent of doom; just a coughing and heaving of the weather to clear the skies for blue. He couldn’t resent the fallout from it, in the same way that he’d forgotten to resent his own nature. He swigged again at the wine, almost empty. His head spun from the movement and he considered that this would be an opportune moment for a rest. His body had reached the same conclusion some moments before, softening the muscles in his leg sufficiently to buckle them.

It was a twisting fall, but a soft one, at first. Will grabbed for support from a fence pillar, feeling the give in the wood as it began falling with him. Then, he felt resignation as sand-coated ground came up to meet him, sped by gravity, felt the heavy thunk of his torso against wood and sand, felt a sting in his hand from the wire he hadn’t yet swept away, and then a wrenching against his leg as the fence post recoiled.

Seconds passed in a hot confusion as Will moved to push himself upright, and struggled to understand what was stopping him. The wine bottle sat to the side of his face, mercifully unbroken in the tumble and yielding the smallest drizzle of liquid in its base. His left hand _hurt_ ; a puncture from the wire still sticking into it. He shook it, his right hand tucked awkwardly beneath him, and felt a throb before the tip of metal slid out. Further moments passed as he deliberated the best way in which he could use his left arm as leverage without pressing it into the sand beneath him. His head was overheating and thoughts were not coming to him quickly. He settled on making a fist, arched his back up, and pushed. And as his legs followed through on the motion, he felt something like lightning rip through the back of his calf. His body dutifully wilted back to the ground as a noise like a wounded fox escaped his throat. Coughing sand from his teeth, he tried again, this time trying to hold his legs as still as possible, and the same strip of skin protested once again, but not as fiercely.

He could, he reasoned, simply lie here.

He could wait for Hannibal to return, with water, and the means to remove whatever paraphernalia had attached itself to his leg. It was almost tempting to imagine; it would be not unlike having a nap, until someone else could come and fix this for him. Will knew, even as he let the fantasy develop, that this was not his preferred method of handling things. For one, he was certain that Hannibal was very much in his debt after this morning, and he feared that this would upset the balance in a far less enjoyable way than Will had in mind. He tried to think of another, but his brain was rapidly becoming a screeching of nerves reminding him exactly what pain was, and quite how lucky Will had been to have avoided it to this degree for so long. He could feel himself singeing in the heat, through the sunscreen and the cotton of his shorts, and he was becoming increasingly certain that he’d swallowed at least some of the sand his face was once again resting on.

He tried crawling, this time; avoiding the twist that was trying to tear at his leg. It worked, almost; the pull at the back of his legs loosened, snagged at his leg hairs, and slid away as Will pulled himself forward.

He managed to sit up, smoothing away the wood and metal from where he rested, resigned to the sand that was now in his shorts, his mouth, and very likely in every crevice of his skin. He reached for the wine, savouring the dregs and resenting the crunch of it as he swallowed. He felt almost calm, despite the swelling, rising pain coming from his right leg. It was only damage done, he told himself, not danger. He repeated the mantra a few times; damage done, not danger; to still the rising nausea that joined the heat and the pain and anxiety. He peered over his knees, half expecting to see bone peeking through skin, or a complete removal of a lower limb.He was both surprised and relieved to see his shins looking very much intact, with only a few ribbons of red but no visibly torn skin.

He blamed the heat and the wine for his delayed realisation. He looked closer, this time, and noted the sand clumping together beneath his folded legs, and registered the dense shade of red he’d missed seeing for some time. It took some deep, grounding breaths before he tried to turn his leg enough to see the damage causing such a mess. He immediately regretted it when he was met with the sight of a strip of skin only partially separated from his leg, and a stretched triangle of a wound still blossoming with blood that stretched further than he could turn his leg to see.

Instinct, the kind that burst through him more readily than breathing, reminded him that bleeding requires pressure. He fumbled at the wound, succeeding in applying weight to a part of it where skin wasn’t, and blinked the whiteness out of his vision as he reminded himself to breathe. Optimism, slower to materialise but still present, stilled the panic, showing him that for all there was a lot of blood, none of it appeared to be arterial, and that he was in no immediate danger of bleeding out. Guilt, a concept too intimate to ever be far from the threads of his thoughts, was chiding him for being so careless, and for creating what was beginning to feel like a _scene_. Injuries, he felt, were things to be shared with, or caused by Hannibal. Not things to do to one’s self and certainly not things to happen without meaning. He might have been laughing; he couldn’t tell, but noise was wheezing out of his chest in a way which felt faintly hysterical. 

He needed water. Wine. Anything. He needed a way to view the tear in his leg, and he needed something to quieten the feeling of stingers firing into the very exposed nerves. All of these needs were culminating in the realisation that he needed to stand; to traverse the few yards to their house, and to set about fixing himself.

It took far longer to get upright than he would admit to Hannibal. His hands skidded against wood, and just when he managed to lift his hips from the ground, sand crept against the minute opening in his palm and floored him again. Only this time, his legs had wilted flush against the sanded ground, and this time, he roared; unable to contain the blistering agony of thousands of microscopic shards of grit burrowing against muscle. The next minutes were devoid of conscious thought. They spurred Will into movement out of an abstract need to not be experiencing this from a stationary position. He crawled some of the short distance until he reached sufficient leverage to drag himself upright, and tried not to look at the drizzled trail of red he’d left in his wake. On reaching the door to the kitchen, his legs shook and threatened to cave again, but dutifully supported him until he could reach the counter, and the sink, where he clung to the side of it and cursed every second of the sunshine and the storm and the badly built fence and this beautiful, wretched country where the water shuts off and the shops are too far and where he was an idiot for believing he could be anything as simple as _happy_ without finding some way to ruin it for himself. For them. Then, he cursed himself for crying, trying to argue with his body that it didn’t have the surplus of moisture to risk it leaking out through his eyes. And then, frustrated with his silent tantrum, he set about trying to fix himself.

From the fridge, he found wine – the only remaining liquid that wasn’t oil, vinegar, or some ridiculous infusion of herbs of indeterminate origin. From the cupboard, which, Will noted, he had smeared with some startling handprints, he found cloth. Linen, mostly, and doubtless expensive. He was certain there were more tools within reach that could have been put to effective use, but the white hot blot of pain in his brain wouldn’t guide him to them. He navigated himself to the bathroom, vaguely aware that the trail he was leaving in his wake, and the subsequent cleaning it would require, would place him very far within Hannibal’s debt.

The bathtub, which he all but fell into, was cool, and that in itself was a blessing. He wished for more; for the water supply to have returned, and swivelled the faucet. Something lurched, spat out a drizzle of something orange, and remained obstinately dry beyond that. The blood at least, Will noted, wasn’t leaking so much now, and he wondered if he should refer to this as a way of measuring the passage of time, like the sun’s movements across a too-bright sky. He listened in hope for the sounds of Hannibal’s return and heard only the irregular spatting against porcelain. He had to be his own saviour, he knew. The contortions he made to be able to view his leg were far from comfortable; his heel balanced across his knee and his back twisted against the back of the bath, still able to reach for the wine and careful, this time, to only consume it in sips. It took a further five sips before he could bring himself to focus on the monstrosity in his line of vision. The wound gaped at him like a mouth, two browning red lines etched into the depths of it, submerged in contours of fibre and grit and crust and red and oh, _fuck_. At least, Will thought, he no longer felt ashamed of his earlier difficulty with walking.

It needed cleaning. And pressure. And dressing. And, Will acknowledged with a very uncomfortable kind of trepidation, it needed all of the sand out of it.

He took another few sips of the wine – closer to swigs, perhaps. He could imagine the method; liquid, into the maw of the injury, at high pressure. The glass bottle in his hand was incapable of producing anything beyond a tumble of wine, and Will was still uncertain as to whether the sweetness of it would counteract the sterilising benefits of it. Still, the gristle of friction had the effect of tiny claws pulling at sinew, plucking and twanging, and something needed to stop it. So, he poured. The bottle rolled out of his grasp within a second of the liquid hitting the open skin. The clatter of it against the bottom of the bath went some way towards complimenting the sounds from Will’s lungs, but after it stilled, Will remained vocal; vowel sounds to begin with, then a grind of spat curses and the smacking of skin against the bath to get the feeling out of him, somehow. Then, a sort of quiet. A fast, thready breathing, a tremble of eyelids, and something that was close enough to unconsciousness for Will to fold backwards, dropping his head on the lip of the bath, and not be aware for some long moments of quite where he was.

Hannibal found him, like this. Peaceful, almost, but for the twitching in his breathing and the clench in his knuckles.

“Will, what have you done?”

Will felt, for the first time in what may have been hours, something pleasant. A warm hand on his cheek, another on his wrist. A voice he could bathe in. Then, he felt glass against his bottom lip, cool and smooth, and heard the instruction to drink. His mouth flooded with water and he gasped into it, felt it flushing past his tonsils, felt his shrunken cells swelling. His leg was merely smarting. Aching. Stinging. Things he could deal with. He opened his eyes to more water, let Hannibal tilt his head to drink it, resting his cheek in the palm of his hand as Hannibal asked him who’d done this.

The shame kicked in, then. Will understood what Hannibal must have returned home to. A silent house, and a breadcrumb trail of handprints, footprints, stains and smears. The smell of sweat on Hannibal’s skin was heady; a nervous mixture of heat and panic, and wholly incongruous with the Hannibal he used to know.

“No one did it,” Will said, trying to sound reassuring and apologetic and failing at both, his voice lost to coughing. “I did it.”

Hannibal’s expression coloured, darkened at the edges and he scrutinised Will.

“Not…deliberately,” Will added, in case he’d somehow led Hannibal to believe that he’d disrupted their idyll by hacking at himself in spite for their contentedness. He started to admit that it was nothing more sinister than a fall, then reviewed his chosen words before he could speak them. There were few sensitivities left to both of them, but the gargantuan task of healing in the wake of Will’s cliff dive was one of them. Instead, he said, “There might be evil in storms after all.”

Hannibal did not look amused. He looked as though he’d been shocked so thoroughly that words were not yet his to wield, and instead gripped Will by the arms and placed a hot kiss to his forehead, traced it down his cheek to the scar line and clung to Will with inescapable strength. Will understood, then, the full impact of being loved, and the fear and hurting that winds its way through that. He welcomed it. The closeness, the need, the fear that skin might stop touching skin, and the hollowness that follows. He shifted his head to meet Hannibal’s lips, to tell him this without speaking. Hannibal answered, kissed him softly, then unsoftly. He only pulled away when grit found its way into his mouth and he pointed this out to Will, as though him harbouring sand had been a deliberate attempt to inconvenience him.

“We’ll have to get that out of you,” he told Will, his tone uncharacteristically cautious. “It won’t be comfortable.”

Will had accepted that. Comfort was what he’d had, and he never expected it to be lasting, not really. He remained still as Hannibal tested the taps again and reassured Will that he’d bought them ample water to sustain a season’s worth of storms. He’d followed Hannibal’s instructions for movement, then accepted the arms that lifted him into position. The bathtub, Hannibal told him, was the best place for this. And so, Will knelt at its end, leaning over the ledge of it, his calves laid out behind him in the well of it, with towels placed beneath his torso. Another towel was folded beneath his knees. Then, a chair was dragged in to bear the weight of his head, and that too was padded. It was almost, _almost_ comfortable.

When Hannibal next appeared, he had an armful of plastic water bottles, a knife, and two belts of soft leather. Will wanted to question the intention of each object, but he also didn’t want to hear the answer. Hannibal urged him into understanding, stretching the first belt out in front of Will’s face. He baulked, at first; when they did this, this wasn’t how they did this.

“You’ll need to bite down on something,” Hannibal told him, waiting patiently for Will to unlock his jaws and allow the leather to rest between his teeth. “This has the benefit of not causing damage to your teeth, and of familiarity.”

Will felt momentarily grateful that his skin was already so flushed that any fresh episode of blushing was well disguised. The second belt wrapped around the top of his calf, a makeshift tourniquet applied perhaps a little too late.

“For future reference,” Hannibal said, dabbing at the skin around the gape, “It’s best to avoid alcohol near an injury of this depth. Unless you were attempting to speed your inebriation?”

Will couldn’t answer that he would bear that in mind the next time wire tore through his skin, and settled instead for growling into the leather. He softened at the feeling of fingers across his scalp, of palms against his shoulderblades and of a soft mouth at the base of his back.

“I want you to focus on my voice, Will.”

Will was focusing on the way Hannibal was piercing the lid of each water bottle with the knife, and on the way that his leg was steadily deadening.

“I’m going to count down from three, and then we’ll wash the wound.”

Will almost enjoyed the way Hannibal made it sound like a collaborative effort, as though he had a role in this to play beyond endurance. He gripped his hands together in front of him in anticipation.

“Three.”

Will expected it on the first count, and found himself almost disappointed when it didn’t start.

“Two.”

Will didn’t expect it on the second. So, when the water hit, and it hit like a drill boring through every nerve he didn’t know he had, he clamped his teeth so hard against the belt he felt his jaw cramp.

“One,” added Hannibal, the force of the water still unrelenting, burrowing through skin, finding new angles, new pressures. Will kicked with his left leg against the side of the bath, hips rocking against the end of it and doing anything, _everything_ , to make it stop.

“You’ll weather this, Will. As you’ve weathered all things.”

Will became vaguely aware of the water having stopped, and of broad hands stilling the shake in his back. This part, the residual sting and the soothing, was bearable. The next part, the second bottle, was not. At some point, he spat the belt from his mouth long enough to eject the most forceful stream of cursing he’d ever screamed. Hannibal’s name was included in it at least twice, and he should have known to expect that this would do nothing to still the jettison of cold liquid against him. He bore it for as long as it took for the water to run out, and then waited for his limbs to still before craning his neck to face Hannibal. He should have been surprised at what he saw, in another life, perhaps. Instead, he met Hannibal’s vibrant gaze with steel, watching as Hannibal held the red-tipped pad of his forefinger to his nose, inhaled, and then licked.

“You’re…enjoying this.”

It wasn’t a question, or even an admonishment. Just an understanding, voiced, to give it tangibility.

Hannibal was slow to answer, giving every impression of savouring the flavours sucked onto his tongue and not wishing to rush any of them with something so ordinary as a response.

“I believe that advantages can be found in any situation,” he said. “And this is one of those.”

“For you.”

“Yes,” Hannibal answered, reaching for the cupboard and their well-used first aid kit. “For me. And for you; this tells me that you had not festered so long that you allowed infection in.”

“ _Festered_.”

“A poor choice of word, perhaps.” Hannibal slid his hand into the box of tools, extracting something thin that glinted in Will’s peripheral vision. “There is more to be done to ensure the cleanliness of your injury, Will. The belt may still have its uses.”

Will stilled at that, having only just acclimatised to the freezing, burning singe of pain radiating from his not-numb-enough calf.

“No.”

“Or we can allow the skin to hang freely, for the muscle to remain split, and for every local parasite to –”

“Fine. Just…”

Will wasn’t sure what caveat to plead for. The Hannibal who’d clung to him when he first entered the bathroom was no longer present, and the version kneading at his leg, holding him in his grip, was no less loving, but was infinitely more cruel. Will still wasn’t sure which version he preferred.

“I will be as swift as my tools will allow,” Hannibal said, stretching an arm to stroke at the small of Will’s back in something like tenderness, but not quite. “The belt, Will.”

Will felt himself heating as he placed it between his own teeth, now complicit in the suffering that was guaranteed to follow. He tried to remain still as tweezers bit through his flesh, tried to keep the hoarseness from his voice as things pulled and wrenched inside him. He only shouted to stop once; a guttural noise of sibilant sounds sputtered against leather, and was almost disappointed when Hannibal did as he asked.

“This will only prolong things,” Hannibal had said, and then there’d been fingers on his neck, his shoulders, something so soft and so reverent that it only made the continuation of the pain seem more brutal by contrast. Will remained relatively quiet after that, even when damp fabric scratched against the inside of the wound, when another spurt of water flushed through it, and when something dry stuffed inside the opening. He was nauseous, blanching as tape pressed across the padding, and then the prodding and the moving finally stopped. He let the belt drop from his teeth.

“No stitches?” Will asked, mouth dry and not wanting to hear the answer.

“Not until we know it’s clean.”

“Thank you.”

Hannibal didn’t answer, either not accepting his actions as merciful, or unwilling to concede to a concept as light as gratitude. Will couldn’t tell, and savoured the silence, and the still. He let his arms fall limp against the side of the bath, let his head rest against the towel now damp from sweat and saline, and let Hannibal rest his damp hands on him.

They stayed like this for a period of time not marked by minutes, but languishing breaths of something like relief and something more intimate. Will disrupted the calm first, offering apology. They’d come so far without bloodshed, after all. It seemed a shame to spoil the tranquillity they’d found here, with no one to disturb them but each other. They’d finally attained something elevated, somehow; a life where they were the sole rulers of their destiny. Will couldn’t fight the feeling that he’d ruined it, somehow. Pulled them back into echoes of their former lives, and given Hannibal none of the satisfaction of it. Hannibal listened, cutting Will’s shorts from him and splashing a softer spray of water across his back, in lieu of a shower. He guided Will from the bath, saying nothing to allay Will’s doubts, his embarrassment, or his expectation that something would have to change because of this.

“I was so worried,” Hannibal eventually said in answer, taking Will off guard as he was laid on his front on their bed. Hannibal had never been a stranger to death, to the threat of it. And Hannibal had long danced with the notion of Will’s demise, just as Will had with Hannibal’s. Yet hearing it spoken, so openly and sincerely, and said after the shock had passed, it felt almost painful in its honesty. That it was said after Hannibal had reverted to being the Hannibal who took loving delight in Will’s suffering only deepened the impact.

Hannibal lay next to Will, an arm draped over his back in a gesture of protection, or possession.

“It’ll take a full day to get your blood off the paintwork, I imagine,” Hannibal added, the levity breaking the weight of truth between them. “And that fence still looks like a lot of work.”

“Which I’m sure you’ll manage, Hannibal.”

“Are you telling me that I’m to clean up after you?” Hannibal asked, something fond and almost playful in his voice. “Surely you’ll owe me for that?”

Listening to him, sharing with him, and being with Hannibal was not unlike being adrift in a roiling ocean, with its swells and dips and risk of drowning. The sunshine and the sand was never the source of Will’s happiness, he knew. It was the backdrop for it; a chance to shed the brittle cold he was used to. The crux of it, though, that was all Hannibal, and everything that came with him. The pain of him, the heat and the ice and the hunger they felt together, that was what mattered. They could be anywhere, as long as their orbits remained intertwined. Just here would be fine, for now.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who's a) super late to the challenge and b) trying to stealth-post this from the work PC. OOPS!


End file.
